IBM buyout of SoftLayer... good or bad?

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41191.wss

Hi Susan,

Thanks for the post. I'm sure I wouldn't have heard of this otherwise.

To answer your question, my answer is: it depends. Beyond the public relations of the message itself, if IBM is merely acquiring more know-how and/or getting into another section of a market, that won't be a problem.

If, however, their purpose is to merely get rid of competition (actual or perceived), then SoftLayer customers won't be well served.

Before the posts of doom and gloom go out by others, I will also add that I have worked with tools which have been acquired by IBM: in some cases, those tools quietly get relegated away if they pose too much of a threat to IBM's other offerings, but in others, IBM has made their purchases flourish.

Regards,
Tom

I do not know of any specifics related to this deal, however, my guess is that this is a buy for the potential of SLs secret sauce. I suspect this will not be detrimental to customers of SoftLayer in the short term. Had someone like Adobe or an Enterprise Cloud vendor picked up SoftLayer, I'd have been concerned. We'll see. It will certainly tick the box for investors who are asking what IBMs Cloud strategy is.